Macromedia Open Sources Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit on OSFlash

I'm so happy I can finally talk about this -- the latest exciting update in the world of open source Flash: Mike Chambers just announced the release of the Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit as open source.

According to the project site, The Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit "allows developers to get the best of the Flash and HTML worlds by enabling JavaScript to invoke ActionScript functions, and vice versa. All major data types can be passed between the two environments including: objects, arrays, strings, numbers, dates, booleans, nulls and undefined. The Flash JavaScript Integration Kit works across all major browsers and operating systems. It is released under an open license derived from the Apache 1.1 license."

For a demo of the type of experiences you can create with the kit, see the Category Feed Report on MXNA. (Click on the bars in the chart and notice the HTML content change, right-click in the Flash application to see its source.)

As part of the open sourcing process, the project was moved from Macromedia's internal servers to OSFlash. Macromedia has been hugely supportive of the OSFlash initiative since its inception not two weeks ago and I keep getting surprised at how quickly OSFlash is growing (currently we have close to 300 members on the mailing list and the Wiki has exploded with content, with more being added by the community every day -- we are also hosting seven open source Flash projects, including ARP and swfmill.)

Big thanks to Mike Chambers and Christian Cantrell from Macromedia for authoring and releasing this hugely useful kit. Thanks guys! I'm sure that the Flash community will embrace this project. Already, I know that someone is working on a Service class for it for ARP (nope, not me!) :)

You can download the latest release from the Flash/JavaScript Integration Kit product page on Macromedia and browse the SVN repository on SourceSecure.

For more information, please see Mike's blog post.

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